The rain came down harder and they shook more.
“Let me by, at least,” I demanded.
They moved shoulder to shoulder in one quick motion. It was a bit more than that, dear reader. A bit more than shoulder to shoulder like the von Trapp children.
Their faces all morphed. A wave radiated through.
My heart beat in my ears.
I got out and stood behind the open car door holding the handset. “Why?” I called out to them in a plangent voice, almost begging. “Why won’t you let me go?”
I flicked on the red-and-blue lights. Nothing. I blasted the siren. Nothing. Not a blink. Nothing but shivering bodies so tight they looked woven together.
I looked closer. I was the one blinking in the rain, in disbelief.
Maggie rumbled low from the back seat.
I got back in and put the car into drive and pulled up so that we were twenty feet from them. The headlights and emergency lights splashed all over them. Their eyelids flexed in the lights and rain. Drops sparked as they passed through the beams.
Their shivering became shaking. Then it became a fearsome quaking, set to explode.
Their flesh—at their bare places, elbows, knees, ears, and even cheeks. The skin started to… join.
The white stuff. A mesh of it flung out like webbing, conjoining them. Before my eyes, in seconds, that latticework thickened. They formed a human wall.
I put my shaking hand to my mouth. My body and mind thrummed with ancient terror.
All the noise in the world was the sound of rain hitting the pavement and car metal and Maggie’s throat rumbling. In my rearview I saw the silhouette of her hackles rise. I felt my hair and skin rise and turn to gooseflesh.
The kids’ skin morphed and connected. Ours rose and spiked.
Organisms displaying vital tropisms at a standoff.
In park, I revved the engine, let it fall off. I repeated this, the car lifting and surging, hoping to threaten them. Angry with them, I threw open the door, pulled out the glock, stood between car and door, and drew the gun down on them.
They stepped forward. I didn’t move. They came at me, moving together. The lines of them extended beyond the road. They rose together out of the foliage and trees on both sides. Before they could surround the car, I jumped in and reversed with the pedal floored.
Fifty yards up the street from them, I spun the car around, stopped, and looked in my rearview. They, too, had stopped, and I could just see that they drew apart into individual beings again.
The rearview mirror shook with the police car’s acceleration.
It stood behind the children.
Its spread wings spanned beyond the road.
I’m flying down south on Red River, trying to beat them over on to I-35. Up ahead looms UT’s indoor athletic practice facility, which had been a huge white dome made of air-inflated fabric. The dome was gone; the thing looking like a collapsed cake.
I swung a hard left and there they were, spanned across Dean Keeton Street.
Back down Red River I flew, past the stadium, through MLK, assuming they’d have an established checkpoint there too. Past Brackenridge Hospital, through the Red River music district. I didn’t want to cut over yet, didn’t want to lose time against them.
There couldn’t be enough of them to cut me off at every turn. At some point they’d get spread too thin. I get down to First Street going freeway speeds, catching air in this police cruiser more than once, Maggie hitting her head on the ceiling.
When they were all together like that, I knew I couldn’t physically get through. I couldn’t do it anyway, plow into them like that idiot at South by Southwest a few years ago, at Charlottesville. If I did, I’d take the first three rows of kids out, but they’d be all glued together like that and by sheer mass and size they’d stymie and surround me.
Then what? I didn’t know.
I thought of Nate as the dogs surrounded to him. His cries echoing the cliffs.
The frontage road to I-35 becomes visible. I punch it. I’m getting through. I’m laughing with Maggie. We come over the rise doing eighty and I imagine thousands of children running to this spot realizing that they aren’t going to make it and their collective panic rising into some frenzied quantum entity capable of doing things I can’t conceive.
We take the rise. We catch air. My headlights skim the clouds. Rain drops little meteors. I’m flying.
The tires hit the pavement and there it is. A pile of everything they could get their little hands on, all smashed and swirled together forming a macabre mountain, a mockery of the old world. Reminded me of the pile of furniture in the bottlenecked street in Les Misérables, but this one was lined with corrugated metal and an actual stop sign they’d transplanted into the middle of it all. It was thick, it was tall, and it covered the access road and well beyond into the dark. Off-roading over the wet ground, down the slope, would be chancy at best.
The stop sign bore their handprints like paleo cave walls.
They’d done this everywhere, I knew. In every street out of the city there would be old-world heaps. Busy beavers while I was gone. Sure, I could try to blow them up with scavenged explosives (blowing my hands off and bleeding to death in the process) or plow through them with a vehicle from Camp Mabry. And let’s say I could even start making headway through. They’d be waiting for me on the other side.
They’d act on fear. They’d just as soon jab me with pointed sticks like Jack’s gang in Lord of the Flies than lift me on their shoulders, their hero.
They’d already destroyed anything I could’ve used to go around or get through. I’d find tires slashed, engine blocks smashed. I was still holding on to hope of some sort of control, a solution based in the old-world way of thinking, which is the only way I knew to think.
They were going to show me another way. It had to be their way.
They’d let me back in but now they wouldn’t let me leave.
I heard them coming, a rumbling herd in the dark closing in. They sang-hummed. That flanged polyphonic nightmare-dream sick-sweet sound rode the air into my mind. They flew through the night, leaping and climbing over anything that got in their way. Night of the locusts.
The suite at the W Hotel was heaven. The sheets, dry and crisp and smelling of industrial soap. There was the stink, to be sure, but once I climbed up to the tenth floor, the smell dissipated. I looked out over the black city. Not a single light, fire, nothing but abject darkness. The only light in this entire city was my flashlight flitting about the room.
I’m sure they all looked up at my window, the light swirling around inside.
My alarm didn’t go off and it’s SAT day. My alarm didn’t go off and I’m in a New York hotel and the parade is over. Nobody came to wake me.
I was late. Kodie needed me and she was so very far away.
To get a better view, I had run up to the top of the hotel, wandered breathless toward the first open room door I saw. Outside the door stood a housekeeping cart, spray bottles hooked along the side.
The woman from housekeeping lay on the bathroom floor. I couldn’t look long. Nature had carted away most of her flesh. It stunk, but not so bad as in the first days. Fat angry flies jumped from her to me. I ran out and slammed the door. The next open door was to a big suite, windows open to half the city.
They had done it. On every road out of town. Piles of stuff dammed up onramps, freeways, regular streets that led out of the city. From up here I saw the rough pattern of their blockades formed a huge circle. If I managed to get through or around, it’d be the wall of flesh again.
Lady Bird Lake, Lake Austin, thinning down into the Colorado River. The morning sun burnished it silver atop the blue and green.